Business Leaders Predict Weak Recovery : Economy: Nearly half of the firms responding to a survey report lower sales and profits--an improvement over last year.

Ventura County’s economy is bouncing along the bottom, not getting any worse, but not getting much better either, according to a countywide survey of business leaders.

Although some area business leaders are hopeful about the rest of the year, most forecast a weak recovery at best. And what optimism exists could be overwhelmed by more bad economic news, said the author of Ventura County National Bank’s semiannual survey.

“We have changed our attitude from two years ago when we believed the economists who said the recession would be short and shallow,” said Richard L. Ball, a bank vice president who developed the survey. “We’ve seen two dips, and I wonder if we’re looking at a third.”

Nearly half of the 558 businesses that responded to the survey this summer reported a drop in sales and profits in the first six months of the year. But that was actually an improvement from last year, Ball said, when a slightly higher portion of the companies reported lower sales and profits.

The results suggest that the county’s economy is ending the free fall reflected in each of the 10 semiannual surveys the bank has conducted since 1987, Ball said.

“We’ve definitely reached the turnaround place.”

But any recovery was spotty at best, and only in select industries. In others, pessimism continued to run deep, a phenomenon that economists say often perpetuates a poor economy.

“People won’t spend when they’re worried about their paycheck,” said Steve Cavanagh of Vreeland Cadillac in Oxnard. “Car sales have not hit bottom yet.” He said that customers are still more concerned about monthly payments than pin stripes.

The bank’s survey was released a day after Abex Aerospace, one of Oxnard’s largest employers, announced it was closing its Oxnard plant because of a declining aerospace industry. The decision puts 550 employees out of work or forces them to transfer to the few openings available within the company outside the county.

Maria Collier, an Abex aerospace technician and labor union representative, said many of the newly unemployed have never worked outside of the defense industry and will have a tough time finding work.

“There aren’t a lot of jobs out there, especially in this industry,” Collier said. “It’s going to be a flooded market, and California is not prepared for that.”

Overall, more businesses reported a decline in sales and profits than reported an increase, but businesses in a few areas and industries performed better.

In the survey’s geographical breakdown, only a majority of businesses in Fillmore and Westlake Village reported more rising sales than falling sales, according to survey results.

Larger companies that responded to the survey fared better than small companies. While a majority of companies with annual sales below $250,000 reported a decline in sales volume, a full two-thirds of companies with more than $10 million in sales reported stronger sales, the survey showed.

“My perception is that larger companies have taken all of the prudent steps to shore up their operation,” said Ball, citing reductions in staff and other overhead. “They’re operating on a much leaner basis.”

At the JC Penney department store in Ventura, for example, store manager Paul Chatman said the introduction of lower-priced goods for the thrift-conscious has helped with the store’s bottom line.

“We’ve addressed the downturn by having ‘every-day low-value’ items, and they have sold well,” he said.

While the decline in sales and profits that began in 1987 appears to have slowed, few business leaders believe a strong recovery is under way. Asked to rate the county’s economic recovery from recession on a 1-to-10 scale, with 10 representing a full recovery, fewer than one in five respondents rated the recovery at 5 or above, while one in three answered 1 or 0.

Just one of the 552 respondents who answered the question rated the recovery a 10.

William A. McAleer, the bank’s chief executive officer, said the survey’s findings should be sobering to the business community.

“We would urge caution among those who expect the local economy to improve significantly any time soon,” McAleer said in a statement. “Unless a satisfactory resolution is achieved in several of the state’s problem areas, this lethargic recovery period could easily stretch through 1993 and even into early 1994.”